A New Interaction Paradigm
The REAL value proposition of large language models.
In 2024, it seems impossible to open your phone without hearing about yet another large language model. Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, a flurry of Big Tech companies have launched their own large language models. The demand for compute-intensive hardware has seen NVIDIA’s market cap more than triple. While every company seems to be building their own "copilot," it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. In the context of the tech industry and society at large, the real value proposition lies beyond chatbots and content generation.
The current paradigm of products built with large language models is heavily influenced by Microsoft's paper, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4. More resembling a sales pitch than a technical research paper, it showcases examples of OpenAI's flagship model completing a variety of tasks, from answering simple mathematical questions to generating lines of executable code. Since its release in March 2023, this paper has become standard reading material for corporate strategy on Generative AI. Many companies have simply adopted the examples in the paper for features and products in their own industries, building wrappers around the foundational GPT-4 model.
However, taking a long-term view of technology's evolution since the beginning of the computer age, large language models fundamentally changes how humans interact with technology. The journey from punch cards, through typing commands into a terminal, to the advent of point-and-click graphical user interfaces, culminates in our ability to communicate with computers using the same medium we use with other humans: language. While no one knows what the future will look like, we can be certain that our relationship with technology will become much more intuitive, and we will start to see our devices not just as mere tools, but as entities that are more than just extensions of ourselves but also extensions of human society and culture.